Coffield Unit at the Tennessee Colony prison in Texas currently houses William Steed Kelley. "I was introduced to the endemic violence Texas chooses to call criminal justice just a few weeks after high school graduation," he writes. He is now 41. He took the Long Ridge Writers' Group writing course "to acquire the skills necessary to give appropriate expression to what I must say before departing this world. With time and practice, I have found that writing helps me decide what I really think and feel about things - one has to understand before anyone else can be made to understand through writing". These 23 years can never be returned, he writes, "but my life—however difficult—will serve a positive purpose if I have to move heaven and earth to that end". This essay is his first publication. An earlier version, "The Seeds of Jasper Hate", won the PEN American Center's second prize for nonfiction in 2007.
